It is often necessary for insurance adjusters, geophysicists, construction workers, real estate developers, and others working in the field to gather and assimilate geographic, topographic, visual (i.e., photographic),and other information about a site. These sites may be in locations which are remote and/or have no readily available access to computers or even power sources. Currently, there is no handheld portable device for gathering and processing such information.
Printed maps are available for viewing almost all features that have geographical locations. A limitation of printed maps is that a user must manually sort through the entire map in order to find the relevant geographical features. Electronic maps have recently become available to replace paper maps for some applications. A map database is stored in a memory storage device as a bit map or as vectors that point to a map character.
Many electronic location determination systems are available or have been proposed to provide electronic location information to a user equipped with a location determination receiver. Ground-based location determination systems are well known and include systems that were developed primarily for communications, such as cellular telephone, FM broadcast, and AM broadcast.
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a global navigation system that enables the user to utilize signals broadcast from satellites in order to identify positions. GPS systems are well known and widely used to accurately locate specific positions. GPS systems, which utilize a network of satellites to identify locations on the ground, are widely used in automotive and nautical navigation, construction, mining, and farming, as well as in a variety of other applications. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,528,248 and PCT Application No. WO 95/05686. Other satellite positioning systems, such as the Global Orbiting Navigational System (GLONASS) are also known. Cartographers, utilities operators, wildlife managers, and others have used GPS technology in conjunction with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to augment map making procedures and other field work, particularly in remote locations. In such applications, there has been an increasing use of computers to facilitate data storage and retrieval.
Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) is a generic name for a handheld personal computing device having a volume in the range of about 200 to 1200 cubic centimeters. PDAs can have as much computing power as some desktop personal computers and have been used in a wide variety of applications, including mapping.
Unfortunately, hardware and software hurdles have limited the ability to utilize multicomponent data gathering systems in the field. Connecting equipment such as a GPS, a two-way radio, and a handheld pen computer for use in the field poses a number of obstacles. Many wires and cables work fine on a desktop computer but not on a handheld device. The essence of the subject invention is the development of a rugged, fully-integrated, easy to use handheld multicomponent field data gathering system for gathering positional, image, and other data, and simultaneously processing this information.